Cloud service providers (CSPs) are not all the same. Service performance from the same service provider can vary from day to day. From a consumer point of view, critical performance characteristics vary based on the cloud service model. For end users, SaaS performance measures are perceived as business transaction response times and throughput, technical service reliability and availability, and application scalability. PaaS performance measures, on the other hand, are indirectly perceived by users and defined as throughput, transaction response times, technical service reliability, availability, and the scalability of the middleware. Infrastructure performance, capacity, reliability, availability, and scalability typically define IaaS performance.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• CSP performance metrics
• CSP benchmarks